Spotlight on // Alex Fundora

BFA Computer Animation

Alex Fundora, 23, hails from Buffalo, New York, but has lived in South Florida for most of his life. As a child, Alex would stage epic battles between his action figures. These war games set the stage for what Alex would later pursue as a career, or, as Alex puts it, "Digital character animation is essentially me playing with action figures again, only much more sophisticated ones!" Later, as a teenager, Alex regularly had his head and hands buried in sketchbooks and quickly took interest in the level editors that shipped with games like Half-Life and Quake. Looking back, Alex says, "After high school, there was no question that my future would be in the digital arts at some point."

Digital Media Arts College proved to be the perfect place for Alex to hone his burgeoning talents. "DMAC provided the knowledge-base to learn from, as well as a student body full of people of similar interests", he relates. Alex's professors soon took notice of how quickly he mastered even the most technical of concepts. Of that he says, "It's easy for me to be very concentrated on a subject, especially when there is a challenge behind it." But even a natural talent like Alex, whose passion for the digital arts drove his skill, had early conflict as to the route he should take. "I was uncertain during these years on what I wanted to focus on, so I wanted to experience as many facets as I could early on, so I would have a much more clear vision towards the end of my DMAC experience.  I found that the area of art that I kept returning to was character animation." Soon the path was set. "Animation is hands down my niche in the digital art world.  I am motivated by all genres and styles of animation so long as I get to put life into awesome characters!", Alex enthuses.

After graduating from DMAC, Alex found himself in the envious position of character rigger and animator at Shadows in Darkness, a top video game developer in Coral Springs frequently contracted by big-name studios like EA, Activision, and Disney. "I was contracted with Shadows to rig and animate a ton of lowpoly characters for an isometric strategy-esque game.  The characters were modeled and textured by other artists within Shadows, and then handed off to me as soon as they were in a state ready for rigging", Alex says of his first experience in the field. The preparation he received in college really paid off. "At DMAC, students are tasked with rigging complex film-quality characters that posed tedious challenges from beginning to end.  Having rigged so many of these characters within my time at DMAC made the 1000-triangle characters from Shadows a walk in the park.  Rigging an entire character took no longer than an hour", he says coolly. Since then, Alex has gone on to work on games like Highborn and Dungeon Defenders.

Alex has certainly risen in the digital art world quickly, and he has some advice for the rest of us who are looking to make names for ourselves, "It is no coincidence that those who can draw well are also the ones who make awesome digital art. Keep drawing; the programs are nothing but sophisticated pencils." Will do Alex!

Back to Spotlight On